Explaining cross-country variation in collective action in the digital era

Bringing the Cross Pressures Thesis into the Digital Realm: Subjective Social Network Heterogeneity and Online Political Expression

“…South Korea and Japan are broadly similar in that they are both stable liberal democracies with collectivist cultures, similar electoral institutions, and similar levels of economic development. By contrast, they have vastly divergent overall levels of online political engagement, with Koreans being far more likely to engage in offline and online political actions and expression than the Japanese (Jenkins, 2019;Barnidge et al, 2018). A full discussion of these differences is beyond the scope of the present study, but they can largely be understood as a consequence of differences in incentives for mass contentious action and differences in political context.…”

The effect of exposure to digital appeals to participate in collective action posted by influentials on protest information sharing: Evidence from Japan and South Korea

“…This is an important point because empirical research shows that digitally mediated complex diffusion processes are dependent on social network dynamics, and these can in turn vary across network types (Siegel, 2009) and national context (Jenkins, 2019). Such diffusion processes occur frequently on digital media because of the way it connects disparate individuals and exposes them to content.…”

“…While the two countries have a number of broad contextual similarities, they have diametrically opposed collective action profiles, with the percent of Koreans reporting participation consistently being far higher than that of Japan (Jenkins, 2019). There are remarkable differences in political culture as well.…”

“…The literature has tacitly assumed that social media and related affordances are used more or less in the same way across all contexts, or at least in the developed democracies. Yet, networked action-whether it is crowd driven or elite driven-is a contagion phenomenon that conforms to threshold models of human behavior, so the diffusion of collective action information depends upon the operation of social network dynamics, which can vary across network types and national contexts (Jenkins, 2019(Jenkins, , 2020Siegel, 2009). It is possible that the effect of influential appeals also varies across contexts, since individuals are embedded in a larger social context that might in turn moderate their motivation to share the appeal on social media.…”

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“…What is most theoretically relevant about digitally networked activism is the phenomenon of scaling-up of action frames, and collective behaviour itself through networks, with or without the participation of organisations. Accordingly, communication among actors, citizens and interested parties themselves constitutes a central mechanism for mobilisation (Jenkins, 2019). Therefore, activists' digital posting of videos and text tends to create visual or textual spectacles that add emotional and human angle dimensions to the protest, attracting needed attentions and conveying multiple interpretations (Kim, 2019).…”